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Re: Obama's "Public" Health Care Plan

Healthcare needs to be reformed. Nothing is going to be perfect. Get involved.

Obama can take his bull$hit healthcare plan and shove it.

Dr. Seuss for 2011:I do not like this Uncle Sam, I do not like his health care scam. I do not like these dirty crooks, or how they lie and cook the books. I do not like when Congress steals, I do not like their secret deals. I do not like ex-speaker Nan, I do not like this 'YES WE CAN'..I do not like this spending spree, I'm smart, I know that nothing's free. I do not like their smug replies, when I complain about their lies. I do not like this kind of hope. I do not like it. Nope, nope, nope!

Re: Obama's "Public" Health Care Plan

As President Obama tours the country advancing his universal healthcare initiative, there are some dirty little secrets that he and his minions in the media don't want Americans to know.

On Sunday, George Will during the panel discussion on ABC's "This Week," exposed some inconvenient truths about this controverial subject that would likely change much of the public's view if they were regularly made aware of them.

After host George Stephanopoulos opened the roundtable segment, Will marvelously cut to the chase (video available here):
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GEORGE WILL, ABC NEWS ANALYST: [T] this is now a single issue argument about whether or not we’re on a slippery slope to a single-payer system. That is, it’s about the so-called public option. And the president has said, “If you are starting from scratch” -- he said this very recently -- he would go to a single payer. That is, government as the single provider of health care.

Now, there are four arguments for the public option. One is, in the president’s words, it will keep them honest. To try to preserve the government as a lagoon of honesty, you can argue, refuted by anybody who reads any budget of any administration.

Bullseye, for all one need do is look at the totally absurd economic assumptions in Obama's 2010 budget, and one would have to agree with Will. But I digress:

WILL: Second, he says, it will play by the same rules as the private insurers, and therefore, won’t drive them out of business. If you play by the same rules, as you said to the secretary, what’s the point?

Exactly. If the rules of the private insurers are sound enough to be adopted by government, why change things?

WILL: Third, it’s necessary to give what Secretary Sebelius said a choice to the consumers. There are 1,300 entities offering healthcare plans in this country. Another one isn’t going to change that.

Precisely. Taking this a step further, many of these 1,300 entities will likely cease to exist if government gets involved. As such, Americans will have far fewer options.

WILL: Finally, there’s the argument that the American people are not smart enough to handle something as complicated as healthcare and have a competitive market. They’ve done rather well in computers.

Yes, but a common liberal meme is that people aren't smart enough to figure things out, and that's why government needs do it for them.

Fortunately, Will wasn't done, for he later dispelled another media myth about this issue:

WILL: Donna [Brazile], you talk about the 46, 47 million uninsured. Fourteen million of them are already eligible for other government programs and haven’t signed up. Ten million are in households with household incomes of $75,000 a year and could afford it if they wanted to.

Furthermore, an enormous number in that 47 million are not American citizens. Sixty percent of the uninsured in San Francisco are not citizens.

Bingo. So, this 47 million uninsured number the media always throw around is totally disingenuous and largely irrelevant.

That said, it was awfully nice hearing somebody say it this morning.

—Noel Sheppard is the Associate Editor of NewsBusters.

"The most dangerous myth is the demagoguery that business can be made to pay a larger share, thus relieving the individual. Politicians preaching this are either deliberately dishonest, or economically illiterate, and either one should scare us...
Only people pay taxes, and people pay as consumers every tax that is assessed against a business."

Re: Obama's "Public" Health Care Plan

When George Bush tried to tackle escalating Medicare and Medicaid costs and a looming entitlement catastrophe with modest funding cuts in both terms in office, Democrats screeched about seniors losing health care and pronounced Bush’s efforts dead on arrival on Capitol Hill. Now, with Barack Obama in the White House, Democrats have suddenly gone mute as the administration proposes to cut hundreds of billions from both programs. Verum Serum puts together the Democratic Primal Scream Greatest Hits collection, complete with a finale from The Crickets … or some crickets, anyway:

The guys at VS put the cuts at $622 billion, while Bloomberg puts it at $400 billion, plus $600 billion in tax hikes:

Health-care overhaul legislation being drafted by House Democrats will include $600 billion in tax increases and $400 billion in cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel said.

Democrats will work on the bill’s details next week as they struggle through “what kind of heartburn” it will cause to agree on how to pay for revamping the health-care system, Rangel, a New York Democrat, said today. The measure’s cost is reaching well beyond the $634 billion President Barack Obama proposed in his budget request to Congress as a 10-year down payment for the policy changes.

Asked whether the cost of a health-care overhaul would be more than $1 trillion over a decade, Rangel said, “the answer is yes.” Some Senate Republicans, including Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, say the costs will likely exceed $1.5 trillion.

Either way, the Democrats have lost that sanctimonious scolding voice that they had no trouble using when Bush proposed cuts less than one-tenth what Democrats now propose.

Update: Morgen from VS tells me they got the $622 billion number from … the White House. Hope! Change! Empathy!

"The most dangerous myth is the demagoguery that business can be made to pay a larger share, thus relieving the individual. Politicians preaching this are either deliberately dishonest, or economically illiterate, and either one should scare us...
Only people pay taxes, and people pay as consumers every tax that is assessed against a business."

Re: Obama's "Public" Health Care Plan

^^^^Interesting that you had to post about the past. I watched the speech Obama gave at the AMA today. There's much to fine tune and open for debate, but he hit a lot of points that are hard to argue don't exist.

Re: Obama's "Public" Health Care Plan

^^^ Interesting I had to post about the past? Why do you feel I had to? Perhaps you'd like to go into a lil more detail why. I thought it interesting in respect to the fact Obama's plan looks to cut billions from those very same places that seemed to get his cronies soo riled up just a short time ago.

I love the boilerplate straw man construct. Does Obama ever give a speech without invoking the phrase:

CHICAGO – President Barack Obama bluntly told doctors Monday he is against their highest legislative priority — limiting malpractice awards — and earned a smattering of boos from an audience he was here to court for his health care overhaul plans.

Pushing anew to reshape the nation's health care delivery system and extend coverage to the millions who don't have it, Obama went before the annual meeting of the American Medical Association and took on others who take issue with parts of his plan as well.

Calling them "naysayers," "fear-mongers" and peddlers of "Trojan horse" falsehoods, Obama warned interest groups, lobbyists and others against using "fear tactics to paint any effort to achieve reform as an attempt to socialize medicine."

"There are those who will try and scuttle this opportunity no matter what," Obama said.

The Congressional Budget Office has tried crunching the numbers on Barack Obama’s plan to reform health care, which Obama says will save money and protect the uninsured. The CBO director on his official blog says, “Wrong!” — on both counts. The reform plan will cost more than a trillion dollars over the next decade, and while it will put 39 million people on insurance plans, it will drive off more than 23 million more from their existing plans. The cost doesn’t include Obama’s public plan option, either:

According to our preliminary assessment, enacting the proposal would result in a net increase in federal budget deficits of about $1.0 trillion over the 2010-2019 period. When fully implemented, about 39 million individuals would obtain coverage through the new insurance exchanges. At the same time, the number of people who had coverage through an employer would decline by about 15 million (or roughly 10 percent), and coverage from other sources would fall by about 8 million, so the net decrease in the number of people uninsured would be about 16 million or 17 million.

These new figures do not represent a formal or complete cost estimate for the draft legislation, for several reasons. The estimates provided do not address the entire bill—only the major provisions related to health insurance coverage. Some details have not been estimated yet, and the draft legislation has not been fully reviewed. Also, because expanded eligibility for the Medicaid program may be added at a later date, those figures are not likely to represent the impact that more comprehensive proposals—which might include a significant expansion of Medicaid or other options for subsidizing coverage for those with income below 150 percent of the federal poverty level—would have both on the federal budget and on the extent of insurance coverage.

A net decrease of 16-17 million would still leave about 30 million uninsured, according to the figures thrown around by ObamaCare advocates. It would simply exchange individuals in the uninsured category, and those most likely to lose their coverage would be those in lower-income jobs, as well as people working in small businesses and startups.

We would spend a trillion dollars to achieve a net result of solving a third of the uninsured problem. We could have exceeded that by simply paying for private insurance. Assuming an annual cost of $5,000 for basic catastrophic and wellness coverage, we could purchase 20 million plans for the ten years, without overhauling the rest of the American health-care system.

But that would be akin to the “public plan,” which the trillion-dollar CBO cost estimate doesn’t cover. The inclusion of such a plan would remove the incentive for employers to offer insurance at all, which would create many millions more uninsured. At the same time, the public plan would undercut private insurers in the individual markets, pushing people who got kicked out of an employer group plan towards the Medicare-like coverage — and accomplishing single payer by default.

What would be the real cost of ObamaCare? Well north of a trillion dollars. We’ll see if the CBO updates the figures with the analysis of the dynamic impact of the public plan in the coming days, or whether the CBO gets suddenly quiet about it.

"The most dangerous myth is the demagoguery that business can be made to pay a larger share, thus relieving the individual. Politicians preaching this are either deliberately dishonest, or economically illiterate, and either one should scare us...
Only people pay taxes, and people pay as consumers every tax that is assessed against a business."

Re: Obama's "Public" Health Care Plan

Even cBS is getting it now, Obama must be in trouble here.

"How are we going to pay for that, Mr. President?" Sen. John McCain has asked.

That one question - how the nation really pays for health reform - just got a shocking wake up call. The Congressional Budget Office, or CBO, said Sen. Ted Kennedy's health care proposal could cost $1 trillion over 10 years and 36 million Americans would still be uninsured.

Re: Obama's "Public" Health Care Plan

That's how Stu Varney of Fox News just described the prelminary budget analysis from the Congressional Budget Office' analysis of Ted Kennedy's version of universal health care.

According to our preliminary assessment, enacting the proposal would result in a net increase in federal budget deficits of about $1.0 trillion over the 2010-2019 period. When fully implemented, about 39 million individuals would obtain coverage through the new insurance exchanges. At the same time, the number of people who had coverage through an employer would decline by about 15 million (or roughly 10 percent), and coverage from other sources would fall by about 8 million, so the net decrease in the number of people uninsured would be about 16 million or 17 million.

These new figures do not represent a formal or complete cost estimate for the draft legislation, for several reasons. The estimates provided do not address the entire bill—only the major provisions related to health insurance coverage. Some details have not been estimated yet, and the draft legislation has not been fully reviewed. Also, because expanded eligibility for the Medicaid program may be added at a later date, those figures are not likely to represent the impact that more comprehensive proposals—which might include a significant expansion of Medicaid or other options for subsidizing coverage for those with income below 150 percent of the federal poverty level—would have both on the federal budget and on the extent of insurance coverage.

So, the analysis runs like this. It will cost $1 trillion over the next ten years and it will only cover one third of those uninsured. It should be noted that the figure of uninsured also includes illegal immigrants. The White House is already in full damage countrol mode. The statement from the White House is that the plan analyzed by the CBO is NOT the final plan.

That's all true, however, it's very unlikely that the final plan will cost all that much less. So, we can expect that covering all those uninsured in America will cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $300 billion yearly.

That is simply something that will not happen. The public was already weary of Obama's health care reform package and that's when the public expected it to cost $100 billion yearly to insure all those that are currently uninsured. Now, the CBO has figured that number to be three times that estimate.

Furthermore, within the analysis is the prediction that about 23 million people would be removed from the private insurance rolls. This is due to the crowding out effect of the public insurance option. As such, the CBO agrees with those like me that assert that public health insurance would eventually crowd out more and more private health insurance providers until eventually it becomes the only option.

There is no doubt that this analysis is like a haymaker to a fighter that just took the eight count. If Obama's health insurance still passes then Republicans have only themselves to blame. Now, they have all the ammunition they need to make the case that this is the wrong plan at the wrong time.

I’ll be honest. There are countries where a single-payer system may be working.

He forgot to brief Robert Gibbs on which ones. When asked at the press conference today which countries Obama was referring to, Gibbs stumbled:

"I don't know exactly the countries. I think you can if you talk to people in the countries that have those systems, they'd think their health care is pretty good."

After being pushed to give specific countries, Gibbs repeated the reporters suggestions of Canada and Britain, adding "maybe France."

He then went on to undercut the president's entire rationale for major health care overhaul:

"I don't know the exact countries. But i don't think the President is going way out on a limb to say that people in other countries have health care system that they like, just as Americans like the health care system that they have."

Nancy-Ann Deparle, head of the Office of Health Care Reform, March: "There were no defenders of the status quo."

There are no defenders of the status quo. Everyone agrees we have a very serious, unsustainable problem. Except for the spokesman for the president, who says "Americans like the health care system they have."

That's a dangerous comment to make the same week Americans, many of whom may indeed like their health care system despite its faults, are hit with the "eye-popping" pricetag for an Obama-approved overhaul that may or may not actually fix the problems. It's almost as if Gibbs has been taking advice on how best to sabotage the president's message from Joe Biden himself.

"The most dangerous myth is the demagoguery that business can be made to pay a larger share, thus relieving the individual. Politicians preaching this are either deliberately dishonest, or economically illiterate, and either one should scare us...
Only people pay taxes, and people pay as consumers every tax that is assessed against a business."

Re: Obama's "Public" Health Care Plan

Michael Ramirez of IBD Editorials gives Barack Obama’s health-care reform an examination — and discovers that Dr. Obama has the directions backwards on transplantation. The idea is to transplant what works to replace what doesn’t, but Dr. Obama intends to take the worst of government-run health care and drop it into a living, functioning American health-care system:
What works in the US is free-market economics. We have a model for successful, plentiful, and inexpensive health care — in fact, a few of them. Lasik and cosmetic surgery specialties do not get insurance coverage or Medicare, and so patients must pay directly for the services. That not only forces consumers to choose carefully when selecting a practitioner, it also forces providers to become cost efficient. The demand and the lower overhead in billings drives doctors into the specialties, so there is no artificial shortage of providers, as a look at any town’s billboards or Yellow Pages will make plain.

Instead of trying to reinvent the broken wheel of statism, we should focus on reforming the rest of the health-care system so that it works more like Lasik and cosmetic surgery, whose markets function properly.

In that same vein, Sally Satel exposes the latest bit of dishonesty from the opponents of a compensation system for live kidney donors, which Satel belives would eliminate the shortage of transplant organs:

Rarely does NKF appeal to reliable data to support their opposition to even pilot trials of incentives (a proposal the foundation actually endorsed in the 1990s). But when they do, they bungle it.

Payment stands as an affront to those families that have already donated organs of loved ones out of charity. There is evidence to suggest it might prove similarly offensive to future donors. In 2005, the National Survey of Organ Donation found that 10.8% of those polled would be less likely to grant consent for the organs of a deceased family member to be used for transplant if they were offered payment; 68% said they would be neither more nor less likely to grant consent. Thus, there is little data to show that financial incentives would increase donation rates.

The astute and altruistic Virginia Postrel called attention to Fruit’s “misleading math exercise,” as she called it: “to round the figures a bit, 70 percent would be unaffected, and 11 percent would be less likely to grant consent. What happened to the other 19 percent? They were, ahem, conveniently left out—because they would be more likely to grant consent. That’s what’s called a net increase,” she wrote.

Be sure to read it all.

Ramirez has a terrific collection of his works: Everyone Has the Right to My Opinion, which covers the entire breadth of Ramirez’ career, and it gives a fascinating look at political history. Read my review here, and watch my interviews with Ramirez here and here. And don’t forget to check out the entire IBD site, while individual investors still exist.

If a speaker wants to make a point about organizational failure these days, there certainly is no paucity of real-life examples. AIG, Merrill Lynch, the state of California … any of these will do. So when Barack Obama reached for an example in his speech to the AMA of failure through lack of foresight and overwhelming costs, what did he choose? The company he just bought — and sent into bankruptcy:

A big part of what led General Motors and Chrysler into trouble in recent decades were the huge costs they racked up providing health care for their workers — costs that made them less profitable and less competitive with automakers around the world. If we do not fix our health care system, America may go the way of GM — paying more, getting less, and going broke. When it comes to the cost of our health care, then, the status quo is unsustainable.

Er, yes. Which is why no one could understand why Barack Obama kept sinking tens of billions of taxpayer dollars into GM while its pension and health insurance obligations never got addressed. It’s also why we all wondered why Obama perverted the bankruptcy process in order to favor the unions, who insisted on those big, expensive pension/benefits packages that made GM uncompetitive in the domestic and global market.

Obama spent $60 billion to sustain the status quo, GM went bankrupt anyway, and now Obama lectures us on how expensive and futile that exercise is. Well, I hope he learned that much … with our money.

"The most dangerous myth is the demagoguery that business can be made to pay a larger share, thus relieving the individual. Politicians preaching this are either deliberately dishonest, or economically illiterate, and either one should scare us...
Only people pay taxes, and people pay as consumers every tax that is assessed against a business."

Re: Obama's "Public" Health Care Plan

WASHINGTON (AP) - Early work on the ambitious health care overhaul the Obama administration is seeking has exposed the kinds of in-house fights that typify just how hard it will be to get meaningful legislation this year. Case in point: A proposal to help bankroll universal health coverage with a dime-a-can increase in the price of soft drinks.

House Democrats have lots of potential targets for higher taxes as they aim to expand health care coverage to reach the roughly 50 million that experts say are uninsured.

Also under consideration are higher alcohol taxes, increases to the Medicare payroll tax and a value-added tax, a sort of national sales tax, of up to 1.5 percent or more.

The list of options being weighed by the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, and obtained Thursday by The Associated Press, aims to raise some $600 billion over 10 years to partially pay for President Barack Obama's goal of overhauling the nation's health care system to tame costs and cover the 50 million uninsured.

The final price tag for that effort could top $1 trillion, with cuts to Medicare and Medicaid covering the rest of the cost.

The tax options include:

- Increasing the price of soda and other sugary drinks by 10 cents a can.

- Applying a potential 2 percent income tax increase to single taxpayers earning more than $200,000 a year and households earning more than $250,000.

- Taxing employer-provided health insurance benefits above certain levels - a less likely option but one that still is in the running.

House Democrats planned to unveil a draft of their sweeping health care bill Friday. It would require all individuals to obtain health insurance and force employers to offer health care to their workers, with exemptions for small businesses. A new public health insurance plan, strongly opposed by Republicans, would compete with private companies within a new health care purchasing "exchange" where Americans could shop for coverage. Government subsidies would help the poor buy care.

The draft, being released at a news conference of the chairmen of the three committees with jurisdiction - Ways and Means, Energy and Commerce, and Education and Labor - was not expected to mention the potentially unpopular tax options.

On the other side of the Capitol, two Senate committees were going in separate directions on their health care bills. The Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee spent a second full day working on an expansive bill reflecting Democratic priorities, while members of the Finance Committee were laboring to produce legislation that could attract Republican support.

To that end Finance Committee senators were looking at leaving a new public insurance plan out of their bill, instead creating nonprofit co-ops to offer insurance in competition with private companies, according to an outline obtained by The Associated Press. The co-ops could accept federal loans for startup operations, but would have to repay the money.

Struggling to pare their bill from an earlier $1.6 trillion cost estimate to about $1 trillion over 10 years, Finance Committee members also were looking at making federal subsidies available to help families with incomes of up to 300 percent of poverty, or $66,000, purchase insurance. An earlier proposal set the level at 400 percent of poverty, or $88,000.

Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., reviewed the plans behind closed doors Thursday with a group of senators he deemed "the coalition of the willing." Republicans present were top committee Republican Charles Grassley of Iowa, Orrin Hatch of Utah and Olympia Snowe of Maine.

"We're getting closer and closer," Baucus said during a break in the meeting. "There's no doubt in my mind we're going to have a bipartisan bill."

Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., who's presiding over the Health Committee work session, dismissed bipartisanship as an end in itself.

"My goal here is to write a good bill. My goal is not bipartisanship," said Dodd, who has taken the committee reins in the absence of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., who's being treated for brain cancer.

---

AP Special Correspondent David Espo contributed to this report.

"The most dangerous myth is the demagoguery that business can be made to pay a larger share, thus relieving the individual. Politicians preaching this are either deliberately dishonest, or economically illiterate, and either one should scare us...
Only people pay taxes, and people pay as consumers every tax that is assessed against a business."

Re: Obama's "Public" Health Care Plan

Imagine, if you can, that George W. Bush made a clearly and deliberately false statement (by the way, what the left claims are his five major lies weren't, and still aren't).

Now further imagine if the Bush administration's response to criticism of the statement, if not true, had been, "Oh, the president's rhetoric shouldn't be taken literally." The press uproar over such a dismissive response would have been justifiably immediate and furious.

In his address to the American Medical Association this past Monday, President Barack Obama promised that:

.... no matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise: If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period. If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away. No matter what.

Well, Richard Alonzo-Zaldivar at the Associated Press at least noticed that Dear Leader's promises can't possibly be kept. But wait until you see his nonchalant reaction to what a conscientious press would immediately decry as a series of obvious falsehoods.

Here are key paragraphs from the AP report (bolds are mine):

Promises, Promises: Obama's health plan claims

President Barack Obama seems to leave little room for doubt when he promises that his health care plan will let people keep the coverage they have. His vow sounds reassuring and gets applause, but no president could guarantee such a pledge.

..... "No matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise to the American people," Obama said Monday, addressing the American Medical Association. "If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your health care plan, you'll be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what."

He didn't let up.

"If you like what you're getting, keep it," Obama said. "Nobody is forcing you to shift."

Yet the legislation the Obama administration is working on with the Democratic-controlled Congress would make major changes in how Americans pay for health care. The goal is to slow cost increases and bring in nearly 50 million uninsured, and the consequences are bound to affect how employers design benefit plans.

..... Earlier this week, a preliminary analysis by Congressional Budget Office estimated that 10 million people would have to seek new insurance under a Democratic plan that a Senate committee is working on, because their employers would no longer offer coverage. Those workers and their families would shop for a plan through new insurance purchasing pools called exchanges. About 160 million to 170 million people now get employer coverage.

Neutral observers are also skeptical. Dallas Salisbury, head of the Employee Benefit Research Institute, called Obama's promise "an aspirational statement."

"If he was a king, he would deliver that, but he's not king," said Salisbury. His group is a nonpartisan information clearinghouse on health and pension benefits.

White House officials suggest the president's rhetoric shouldn't be taken literally: What Obama really means is that government isn't about to barge in and force people to change insurance.

Oh, so I guess it's all okay, and no big deal. "Just words," if you will.

It's just fine that the President of the United States makes a false "vow" (not an "aspirational statement") that really "shouldn't be taken literally" before the nation's assembled doctors. It's just fine, thanks to sanitizedand gullible news coverage, that the "vow" gets disseminated to the American people initially unquestioned. It's just fine that after being correctly challenged by outfits like the CBO and the Heritage Foundation, obsequious reporters like Alonzo-Zaldivar let the administration get away with a pathetic "never mind." And it's just fine that even watered-down pablum such as Alonzo-Zalivar's, published on a Saturday, getsridiculously light distribution, while the AP can risibly claim that they did their journalistic job.

No, it's not fine.

It's not fine because the mendacious seed has been planted in the minds of millions of Americans that Dear Leader is the hero and savior who will lower health care costs while not affecting anyone's coverage or choice of doctor. The White House, for all its feigned irritation, is likely quietly crowing, "Mission Accomplished."

If Obama and his party get their way -- thanks in no small part to "journalists" who initially let blatantly false propaganda slide, excuse it when found, and even decide to serve as prime-time spokesmouths -- we will look back and say that "Obama lied; the best health care system in the world died."

"The most dangerous myth is the demagoguery that business can be made to pay a larger share, thus relieving the individual. Politicians preaching this are either deliberately dishonest, or economically illiterate, and either one should scare us...
Only people pay taxes, and people pay as consumers every tax that is assessed against a business."

Re: Obama's "Public" Health Care Plan

Originally Posted by 3dfxrain

Seriously, I am observing to find out if you guys can really use this plan to do something good.

And we're still waiting to see the whole "plan". Unfortunately Mr. "Transparency's & Post partisan politics" won't let any of the opposition into the closed door meetings to see what they are cooking. The portions they've released and then pulled back are not encouraging at all.

"The most dangerous myth is the demagoguery that business can be made to pay a larger share, thus relieving the individual. Politicians preaching this are either deliberately dishonest, or economically illiterate, and either one should scare us...
Only people pay taxes, and people pay as consumers every tax that is assessed against a business."